


Redefinition

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Assassination, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/M, Falling In Love, Gen, Memory Loss, Minor Violence, Post-Canon, but - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22116481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: There was something about not knowing you had a good thing until it’s gone. Tadaomi thinks that’s bullshit.After a mission gone awry, Irina loses her memory of everything related to Tadaomi and the life they've had together. Tadaomi thinks he's never really known his wife at all.Or: learning to fall in love all over again.
Relationships: Irina Jelavić/Karasuma Tadaomi
Comments: 39
Kudos: 207





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi everyone it's me again! I'm contributing to the Karairi train and I have some Thoughts but I shall save it for the end of this fic (that and it's pretty late here and I wish to post this and go to sleep). 
> 
> I like Karairi! They were my original OTP in Assclass and i hope to be able to explore more of them in the future. For now... there is This.

**Redefinition**

_learning to fall in love all over again_

There was something about not knowing you had a good thing until it’s gone. Tadaomi thinks that’s bullshit, things should always be appreciated as they were and there wasn’t any point dwelling over what you’ve already lost anyways,

but he gets the call at 3am on a thursday night; despite his professionalism his shirt is unironed and his hair is not done, it’s when he tries and fails to unlock his door for the third time and he sees his hands shaking is when Tadaomi realizes he’s  _ terrified _ .

“She’s physically unharmed,” Sonokawa says when she meets him in the parking lot, walking briskly alongside him as she leads them up to the hallway, hesitates, “mostly, some force was used to subdue her but-” She hands him a file, but he doesn’t immediately open it. She doesn’t comment on his state of dress.

Across the one-way mirror, in the middle of the interrogation room, is his wife. Her hair is unkempt, is what he first notices, to see her in such a ragged appearance is worrisome - if he had not been thus informed that something had happened he would be on high alert - and his fingers itch to comb it through. 

But she looks… fine. Physically unharmed, it seems, faint bruises and minor cuts on her visible skin but the wounds are clean, that’s… reassuring. There’s not a bandage on her, except-

-Tadaomi can’t tell what she’s thinking. 

He has learnt -  _ mastered _ , reading his wife’s little tells over the years, he would like to think he’s gotten rather exemplary at it, but the woman in that chair is… unreadable.

No, her facial expression displays boredom. She’s seated straight, legs crossed, leaning a little back into the chair, surveying the empty room with disinterest; unconcerned about her holding conditions. 

“We were hoping you could talk to her,” Tsuruta says, “we haven’t gotten anything out of her since she arrived, but neither have the team back at the station.”

“Give me a breakdown,” Tadaomi says. He watches her stretch a little, roll her head, look at her chipped nails. Little nuances his wife would do, except…

“Halfway through the mission, they just,” Sonokawa mimes a chopping motion, “lost all contact with her. They managed to trace her location, thought something might have happened to her, but she abandoned mission objective on her own accord.”

“That we know of,” Tsurata says, “we don’t know if she’s been coerced or blackmailed or if she had an undercover operation we were unaware of, but she has a track record of, ah,” he glances at Tadaomi, but Tadaomi doesn’t look back at him.

“Switching sides,” he completes.

“I’ll talk to her,” Tadaomi says. 

She turns to him when he walks into the room and when their eyes meet she smiles; his heart skips a beat, but this is not the smile of his wife who he sees in the backdrop of golden light, in domesticity. She smiles like a predator, a seductress; this was Irina not at the window with the afternoon skyline at the back, this was Irina at  _ work _ . Tadaomi’s heart sinks.

“Hello,” he says, impassive, but whatever she picks up in his body language makes her smile wider and lean back in her chair. 

“Finally,” she says, “they bring me someone remotely useful. I have your picture in my wallet and I don’t know who you are,” her gaze flicks to his shocked ones, she’s cool and calm and a little  _ amused _ . “But I’d appreciate if you tell me what I’ve been doing for the past 5 years and why I’m apparently working for the Japanese Military.”

5 years of her life - her time with Tadaomi, her time with 3-E and Koro-sensei, gone in the blink of an eye. Nobody knows what happened, not even Irina herself. She is unable to name any of the presidents, there is no recognition in her eyes as they flash pictures of the crescent moon, Koro-sensei, her work desk. She’s an assassin, this time, she’s  _ dangerous _ , his superiors say, she cannot be left unchecked.

She won’t be left unchecked, Tadaomi says, she’s with  _ me _ .

He knows, he  _ knows _ , this is a bad idea, he knows that they’re right, but there’s an empty space in his bed and he’s standing in a wrinkled shirt and an odd pair of socks and it’s been 2 months, he’d rushed out of bed with Sonokawa’s voice ringing in his ear because he’d thought she’d  _ died _ . 

Tadaomi is a rational man, and he reasons with himself, Irina Jelavic had been a childish woman who found herself inexplicably smitten with him 4 years ago, he handled her then and he could handle her now, even objectively, although there ran the risk of personal and work entanglements but-

“She could slip in your bed and kill you,” one of his bosses point out, “you won’t even register it until you’re dead.”

“She’s my  _ wife _ ,” Tadaomi says stiffly, “she kept mum on her situation until she met someone she could recognize and trust-”

“Your wedding photo was in her wallet,” they say, “need we remind you of her track record 5 years prior?-”

He gives in, he knows he will, watches her settle into a holding cell with graceful ease and wave at the security camera with the grin he memorizes, Sonokawa asks him to get some sleep, it’s 9 in the morning, how is he supposed to? 

There were no details prior to her amnesia, on the mission, Irina had gone dark, but Tsuruta lets him know that she’s readily divulging details of what she  _ does _ remember now - it’s not much. Tadaomi’s not authorized to see her yet, as she goes through grueling psychological evaluations and training videos and gets reminded of the consequences, and 4 months later she comes home.

It’s not Irina. The woman that wears her face - his wife, no - looks at their house with a thinly veiled distaste, Tadaomi knows her tastes have changed and perhaps his style would seem  _ boring _ to a 20 year old Irina - and she’s 20 now, at least mentally, he thinks, and he’s going on 32. They’ve had a bit of a difference before, but he doesn’t know what to feel about it now.

“She might never recover,” the doctor says, “she might. Memory is a tricky thing, you know, incredibly unpredictable, she took a large blow to the head - you can see where her skull cracked a little, here, it’s fascinating that this injury wasn’t discovered sooner-” 

Fascinating, Tadaomi thinks, would not be his word of choice in this case, Irina had a stunning pain tolerance and he’d watched her laugh as she gouged a bullet from her wound on the field and stitched it right there and then, it’d amazed him at first,  _ fascinating _ , then frightened him, and he’d thought he’d never want to know her limits. 

“-of course, you need not lose hope, her brain was mostly intact so there might be a little bit of the 5 years left in there. Give it time, Agent,-”

She makes a funny noise at their choice of decor, the files on the coffee table he hadn’t cleared a day prior, the garish rug she’d dragged home because he thought it was ugly and they’ve grown fond of, the cactus in the lumpy clay pot that stood out of place against the silver and glass countertops. 

“What a quaint little house,” she says, looking as if she’s eaten something sour, and Tadaomi is reminded that this is not  _ their _ home, and she looks at him with an air of judgement and says, “we don’t share a room, do we?”

They do, but he’d taken the liberty of moving her things into a guest room - although he supposes that her things weren’t  _ hers _ anymore. He watches Irina open the closet and make an approving noise at the display - solely her tastes of apparel that Tadaomi had no hand in picking out.

Irina turns back around, clapping her hands together. "What's for dinner?" 

Tadaomi blinks at her. "We could… get takeout.."

"Eugh," she says, sweeping past him and then into their kitchen space, rifling through the cupboards in such an  _ Irina  _ fashion. She whips around, scowling, and the spell is broken. "There's no food in the fridge," she says, "let me guess, I do the cooking?"

It's not a shameful thing to conform to traditional gender roles in the house and Irina - his wife likes to cook, but shame is what Karasuma feels when he says yes, especially with that disdainful look that the woman who has his wife's face gives him. 

They live like this, faux domesticity, for an entire month. One month of having this  _ woman _ in his house, the one who is his wife but  _ isn’t _ . She doesn’t move back into his room - she’s out, more often than not, and Tadaomi wonders what she’s doing, because she’s not authorized for missions for the military, and for a brief moment he wonders if she’s seeing someone else. But he watches her, he tries to do so subtly, and she never spends the night elsewhere and never comes home smelling of anyone else but alcohol and herself (and whichever fragrance she chooses to wear but Tadaomi knows all of them by heart), and she doesn't bring anyone back. She never wears their wedding ring out and Tadaomi doesn't expect her to.

On the 27th day of her stay she brings home a vase, and sets it in the middle of the living room. Then it’s filled with endlessly changing bouquets and blooms, ostentatious and unorthodox, adding a strange contemporary pop of colour to the traditional backdrop of the house. Tadaomi watches her swap out a flower for another with deft hands, he didn’t know she knew flower arrangement. “I didn’t know you liked flowers,” he says, then immediately feels as if he’d put his foot in his mouth.

She turns to him, thinly veiled irritation on her face, but says with a smooth air, “all girls like flowers.”

But Irina didn’t, he almost says, except she looks at Irina pluck a stray leaf out of the vase and preen at the petals and realizes, his stomach sinking, that she did. Tadaomi’d gotten her flowers before, during their anniversaries, because Sonokawa had looked at him with an eyebrow raised and said, “aren’t you going to get your wife flowers for her birthday?” and Tadaomi had thought about it, and Irina had seemed like a flowers sort of girl, but in a flighty superficial way. Watching her know he didn’t think she would  _ know _ flowers.

“How long were you two married again?” Irina says. She makes a distinction between her and Tadaomi’s wife, and Tadaomi knows it’s a reminder.

“Two years,” he says softly.

“Two years,” Irina says. She plucks out a petal, something burgundy, and crushes it in her palm. It leaves speckles of red on the table and staining the tatami. 

He thinks a bit of Reaper, of his flowers, and how the powdery fluff looks like droplets of blood. This Irina, he thinks, is a killer, but that’s wrong. His Irina had been one, too, but she’d kept it hidden behind her mask of domesticity and fluffiness, of them playing house - but also, no, she’d been employed as an assassin, her profession was never a taboo and it had been laid out as plain as day. Tadaomi doesn’t know why he had never seen it.

She’d always could have left him, or killed him in his bed, or strung his corpse up for all to see and immediately have been on the next flight to Mozambique. She was dangerous and Tadaomi thinks she was cute and childish and loves to cook. Does she even love to cook? 20 year old Irina rarely cooks, at least not when he's around to watch it. 

Tadaomi watches the flowers and thinks that there are many things he never knew about this Irina that it seemed like a stranger was living in the house he built with her. She didn't like the decor or the furniture or even the fabric of the couch and those were the opinions of Irina from 5 years ago, how had Irina's tastes changed so much? Irina is adaptable, she's supposed to be, ever ready to adjust to new environments. A lot of her preferences, it seems, went against the life Tadaomi had built up with his Irina, and not for the first time he finds himself questioning their relationship. Did Irina really like their couch, or did she like it because he liked it?

"Do you like tatami?" Tadaomi asks.

"It's okay," Irina says plainly. She continues tending to her flowers.

Tadaomi watches her. He didn't know Irina liked flowers that much. Now he wonders how much else did he never know about Irina.

"Do you like the walls?" Tadaomi asks, again.

"Beige is so boring," Irina says, not bothering to hide her distaste. Her gaze flicks up briefly. "It's okay. I want an accent wall, at the very least."

Everything was just okay. It wasn't supposed to be just okay. Irina wasn't supposed to settle for okay. Had she secretly hated the house this entire while or did she change her tastes to suit his? Did Tadaomi ever really know Irina, or had he only known some strange, filtered version of her?

“I honestly don’t know why,” she says, waving a hand around, “she could have had, she could still have  _ anyone _ , and yet she chose  _ you _ .” Little specks of red fly in the air and dust the furniture.

And Tadaomi…

...he doesn't know why, either.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, so here's the next chapter. It's shorter than the first but I won't say anything about it now.

Tadaomi feels an odd sense of emptiness though the day, and when he’s mindlessly shuffling his papers on his desk he glances at the desktop calendar and it finally hits him. It’s Irina’s birthday. 

He wants to celebrate it with her. This Irina may not be his wife, but Tadaomi still loves her.  He didn’t use to think of the word love as much as he does in the recent months. It’s all he hears now, her voice telling him she loved him, her touches lingering on her shoulder. He wishes he said it to her more often.

He sends her a quick text to confirm that she has no other plans for the day, gets off work early and takes her out to dinner. He tells himself to have no expectations. 

Irina delicately takes his arm and she feels warmer than ever, and not for the first time Tadaomi is reminded of how cold he’s been for the past few months. He almost wishes to pull her in, but he doesn’t. It’s easier to remember that, later, because dinner with this Irina is a high end affair. There are no playful kicks under the table or jokes about assassination or smiles that makes Irina’s eye crinkle at the side. 

“This place doesn’t seem like your style,” Irina says, looking at Tadaomi over the rim of her wine glass. 

“It’s your favorite,” Tadaomi says awkwardly. “Or, was.”

“It could be,” Irina agrees. 

“Happy Birthday,” Tadaomi says, before he loses his courage. He slides a box across the table. “I didn’t know what to get you.”

Irina places a hand on the box. “Oh,” she says, with a funny tone in her voice, and she looks at Tadaomi like she’s trying to figure a puzzle out. “Thank you, I suppose.”

“You probably didn’t expect anything from me because you’re not her, but…” Tadaomi shrugs. The wine on his tongue feels heady. “I like to think I know some things about you.” He’d gotten her a necklace with a little four leaf clover as a charm. He doesn’t know jewelry but walking past the store window, he wanted to keep her safe. A little bit of luck, for her.  That night, Irina smiles at him before she shuts the door to her room. Tadaomi feels his heart pound.

Tadaomi wonders what’s in store for the future between them. He remembers his Irina, the feel of her body under his hands, the sound of shifting sheets as she rolls in her sleep. 

When he was 20, he thought of a family, a nice apartment with a happy housewife and 2 children to come home to every day, hot dinners and warm beds waiting for him.

When he was 25 and he’s seen more of the dying and the injured than most people should, he thinks of hospital beds and gunshot wounds and one of his team members who can never walk again, and telling a widow that her husband will never come home again as her kids cling to her dress at the doorway.

When he’s 27, he meets a woman who’s lost more than he ever will, who acts like she doesn’t have a care in the world and yet handles weapons with too much knowledge of how to use them, who tells him and means it when she says the children, despite the outcome of the year, will never be okay again.

Irina - the Irina he knows - looks at him, the sun setting to the right, shawl loose over her shoulders, the ocean glimmering in her eyes. “Do you know what it’s like to kill?”

She walks in the space around him now, that woman from 4 years ago. She listens to his stories of Koro-sensei with interest and spends her time flipping through the heavy yellow book he’d left her, although her eyes do not spark with recognition as she reads. Tadaomi still never sees her cook but she fiddles with the kitchen knife with an odd ease.

The seventh doctor's appointment bears no better news than the last few, "there's no physical reason why she can't remember a thing," the doctor says, “perhaps-” by which time Irina gets out of her seat and goes to the hallway, door shutting with a soft click. Tadaomi gives the doctor an apologetic look and goes after her, but she’s already down the hallway. 

“Irina,” Tadaomi says.

“Your wife is dead,” Irina says, and she doesn’t look back.

Tadaomi remembers thinking that one cold thursday night, heart threatening to pound out of his chest, fingers running over his wedding ring and praying, praying, praying that he won’t find her in a body bag, hands gripped too tight over the steering wheel and wondering if he was in any state to drive before deciding he doesn’t care.

“She’s not,” Tadaomi says immediately, pauses, “you’re not,” he says.

Irina, the woman that wears his wife’s face, looks at him. 

“You and her, I know you’re not her,” Tadaomi says. “I don’t know much about your life and what you did 5 years ago, but it turns out I don’t know much about her 5 years later either. You are still every part of the woman I love even if I don’t know about it,” he pauses, “but I want to.”

Tadaomi’s read stories of people having amnesia and falling in love with their significant others all over again. He wonders why it couldn’t be this easy for him and Irina, but he supposes nothing is ever that easy with them. He supposes he’s also not the same person this Irina started liking 4 years ago. He still isn’t sure why she liked him in the first place.

“What if she never comes back?” Irina says. “What if you’re stuck with me forever?”

“I’ll always miss her,” Tadaomi says, because it’s the truth. “But before I loved her, I loved you.”

He gave her a rose once, as their students watched them, dashed with grime and blood from Reaper 2.0’s unconscious body. He earned it for her, fought it for her, with his own efforts. Tadaomi didn’t know it then but it was his own, odd roundabout confession. She wouldn’t have betrayed them again regardless, not after the class asked her to come back, but Tadaomi had looked at her and knew that he wanted to personally ask her to stay. He’d seen a little bit of this Irina in her then, the thief and the assassin, the criminal and the double-crosser, and he’d thought, I want to keep her close.

A few months later he asks her to move in with him. 

They’re skipping a lot of steps. They’ve always been odd, like that. They’re falling in and out of and in love in all the wrong ways, but their lives were never normal anyways. There was no definition or methodology laid out for how one has to learn to love. 

He knows some things about her, at the very least, from four years ago that he knows stay true.

“Let’s go shopping,” he says, and Irina looks at him with shining eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we have it. I'm not sure yet if I'll add another chapter to it in the future but we have this for now, I suppose. Let me know what you think!

**Author's Note:**

> And... that's it for now. Let me know what you think, and stay tuned for updates! It should only span two chapters but I haven't written the second chapter yet, depending on how it goes it might be three.


End file.
